


Frostbite

by ellorgast



Category: Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon | Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon, Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon | Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Frostbite, Gen, Post-Apocalypse, Pre-Crystal Tokyo, Shitennou Forums Ficathon, mild body horror, the great freeze
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-10
Updated: 2019-07-10
Packaged: 2020-06-25 14:48:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,362
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19747912
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ellorgast/pseuds/ellorgast
Summary: What if the Great Freeze that preceded Crystal Tokyo took place, but there were pockets of survivors waiting out the long winter? What if Nephrite and Zoisite were reborn into this world of snow, and it was all they'd ever known? What if one day, a stranger was brought in out of the cold?





	Frostbite

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for the 2013 Shitennou Forums Ficathon under the title of "Frozen." I legitimately thought I had posted this to AO3, and was dismayed to realize it was nowhere to be found. I've decided to post it here unedited, so please enjoy this older work.

The medical ward was a great, windowless room, with tiled walls and hard cement floors. Like much of the refuge, it was converted from an old subway line, deep underground where some warmth could still be retained. At one point in time, this place must have been flooded with commuters every day, rushing to get to their places of work on their big mechanical beasts that carried them across the city. Now there were no such modes of travel, nor, really, were there cities. As far as anybody knew, there was only the refuge.

It was large enough to house twenty at once, but at the moment, only a few beds were occupied, ragged curtains hung between them. A lone healer moved between them. He wore no white coat to identify himself. Indeed, in bygone days when the order of healer required a certain decorum, his shirt sleeves, rolled up to reveal vibrantly colorful tattoos, would have been an incredible faux pas. Of course, even when clothing was a matter of practicality more than of aesthetic, the good doctor still managed to be fussy about his appearance, and he wore an immaculately maintained vest over his threadbare shirt.

Nic swaggered across the room, trailing muddy slush from his boots. His coat was a mottled patchwork of wool and pelt, a hood of wolf fur pulled back and dripping snow all over the floor. He unraveled the scarf around his face as he walked, the stubble on his chin tearing at the fibers like velcro. “Zephan, got a patient for you,” he called, hardly bothering to lower his voice in what was meant to be a place of healing.

The healer hardly acknowledged him with more than a glance. The patient before him was a twelve-year-old child with a violent cough. “Mind not getting mud all over my medical ward? Who is it?” The refuge was small enough that, though he did not know every individual by first name, most could be identified by their family or trade. There was no face in the refuge that was unfamiliar. Since elders (anybody over 50) were few and far between, most were like Zephan and Nic: born and raised underground together.

“Dunno.”

“What do you mean, you don’t know?”

“Nobody knows him. We found him outside. You’ll see.”

Zephan did see. When they brought the patient in, he saw that even his own mother would have trouble identifying the man. The frostbite had set in so extensively that most of his features were a black, hideous mask. The healer hurriedly started cutting away his frozen clothes. It was a wonder the man had not already died of hypothermia. “What was he doing outside alone? Didn’t anybody see him leave?”

Nic shrugged. He led the scavenger team, the brave and crazy souls who willingly left the refuge to hunt game and salvage supplies from old ruins. Dying from the cold was an everyday threat for him. “No, but there are half a dozen ways to get outside on the south end alone, and no reason to keep an eye on them. Nobody leaves unless they have to.”

Zephan did what he could for him. Salvaged what was left of the poor man, kept him from dying any further than he already had. But nothing would give life back to the pieces of him that had blackened from cold. Fingers, toes, nose, cheeks... if he survived, it would be as a creature maimed. He would certainly not be the first.

***

"He could be a Miller. Lots of Millers with black hair," Zephan speculated hours later over a glass of paint thinner-grade moonshine that evening. Nic insisted that he get out of the medical ward once in a while, and there was never any shortage of bathtub whiskey at Ginger's market stall. They were in one of the refuge’s main tunnels, the solid old ones from the old days that were wide enough for people to set up shop on either side. Some set up tables, some had a wheeled cart that could be locked up and moved at night, some simply spread their wares out on blankets. Ginger was an old regular at the market, and even had the means to set up a few stools in front of her cart. Beside the cups of burning alcohol, she served up a warming stew of dubious origin.

"Not a chance. I know the Millers. He ain't one of them." Nic took a long swig of the booze without even making a face. "I'm telling you, the guy's a stranger."

"Selene's holy left tit, he is," Zephan croaked, having just taken a sip of the burning liquid. "There are no strangers. And even if he was, where did he come from? How did he get here? You've been out there, Nic. Have you ever seen any sign of life outside the refuge?"

“Sure. Lots of deer. Lots of wolves. Saw a bear once. But it’s not like I can see to the other end of the world out there. We don’t stray far because straying far can mean death. For all we know, there’s a whole city close by that we’ve never seen.”

Zephan sighed into his stew. He did not know how a man who faced the dangerous elements every day could be such a dreamer. 

Nic chuckled. “Remember when we were kids, we found that old radio in your grandmother’s closet? And sometimes, if you tuned it just right, you could hear something beyond the static? Almost like voices?”

“We were kids.”

“You know you heard it too.”

“Maybe. I don’t know.” Zephan used to dream of outsiders, too. He used to imagine that there was a grand city somewhere, full of food and warmth, just like the ones in his story books. And they would come to carry everybody in the refuge away to this city, in one of the old machines his books depicted--an airplane, or a truck. He used to imagine a lot of things. But in his twenty five year life in the refuge, nobody had come. 

“How’s your mystery patient doing? He going to live?”

“If he does, it won’t be an easy recovery. If I had more supplies...”

Nic was on to him. “No. Fuck no. I’m not going there.”

“Come on man, we’re running out of everything. There is stuff frozen in that place that we just can’t make ourselves.”

“We got food to catch. Those ruins are over an hour out, and they’re huge. It would take us all day to wander around in there.”

“Oh please, you just don’t like the hospital ruins because you’re a giant wuss.”

“It’s creepy there!” The hulking brunette exclaimed defensively. “There’s still bodies down under the ice and ugh.” He shook his head. “Nope, no fucking way.”

“So I’ll go.”

Nic actually paused with a spoonful of stew halfway to his mouth. “You? You don’t go outside. It’s cold outside.”

“I need supplies, and you’re a big baby who’s scared of ghosts.”

“And you’re a prissy medic who worries about split ends. You’ll die in five minutes out there.”

Zephan unconsciously reached up to fix his ponytail, where he kept his curly mane of red-blond hair in place. “You want to call me prissy? We’ll see how you feel about it next time you come crying to me about needing a few stitches.”

“I’m just saying, you don’t want to go out there. You whine if there’s a slight draft in your breeches.”

“I need supplies, whether you’ll get them for me or not. Just take me out to the ruins with you, you guys can go hunt or trap or whatever it is you do out there for the day, and just come back for me when you’re done. 

Nic sighed, picked up his glass, and drained what was left of it. “Better find yourself some proper clothes, then. The moment you start whining about how cold it is, I’m leaving you behind.”

***

Later, his head still buzzing with alcohol, Zephan sat by the stranger’s bed with his clipboard. The patient had yet to wake up, and nobody had come to claim him. Though word invariably spread fast through the refuge, perhaps his family simply had not noted that one of their own was missing yet. Perhaps.

Zephan had not always wanted to be a healer. Doctor, nurse, medic, these titles no longer mattered. They were used interchangeably. There was no such thing as a piece of paper telling you what you are qualified to be. He’d studied the old books, learned how to stitch a wound (not so different from stitching together a rabbit pelt coat, like his gran taught him), and did not mind the sight of blood. That made him a certified bone-setter in the eyes of the refuge.

Once, he wanted to be an artist. He looked over the pages of the medical books and saw the beauty in the blue and red veins circulating over the yellowed pages. Sometimes he liked to sketch the hands of his patients, when he sat up with the children with pneumonia. This patient’s hands were best not drawn, so now he sketched a hand from memory, all five fingers still attached and accounted for. His pencil stub danced over the torn scrap paper found in a pile somewhere. New paper was non-existant--anything not produced in a bathtub, out of  
mashed up pulp and a screen, of course--and old paper was most often used as fuel, but one of the perks of being friends with a scavenger was that Zephan got first pick of things that were otherwise bound for the fire pit. 

But there was no room for artists in the refuge. So instead he got to clean up vomit for a living, and sketch hands in the margins of old books.

Zephan glanced at the stranger, his ruined face hidden beneath a mass of gauze. He had, mercifully, not woken yet. There was very little left in the locked storage chest that would ease the pain when he did. He carefully shaded in a finger, one that was not black and swollen from the cold. “Don’t worry, tomorrow I’ll find what we need. And hopefully I won’t come back looking like you.”

***

“It’s so fucking cold!” It had taken less than thirty seconds for Zephan to start complaining.

“I’m sorry, I forgot that you wanted to be taken to the land of sunshine and daisies,” Nic grunted, muffled, through his scarf. No part of him was visible except for his eyes.

Zephan squinted, desperately, against the blinding glare, because though daisies might be a fabled thing of the past, the sunshine was in abundance. He was a child of the underground, used to dim places. Above ground, the world was made of horrible, painful light. White, glistening snow shimmering beneath a pale white sky. The sun, a faint disc behind the clouds, diffused its dazzling glow all around, making every direction equally painful to look at. He spent most of the journey to the ruins with his head down, hunkered into his scarf, blindly following the heels of the scavengers, muttering curses for how cold this damned place was.

They passed plenty of other ruins on the way to their destination. The twisted remains of collapsed buildings rising up out of the snow. Much of it was buried deep beneath the ice, nothing more than a faint mound over which they could easily walk, but sometimes something eerily recognizable appeared. The top of a street light, its pole leaning at an awkward angle. A tattered billboard, a smiling woman still barely visible on the faded canvas.

Zephan recognized the hospital by the big H painted on the wall. To him, who was so used to small spaces, the building appeared enormous, and it seemed to take ages to circle around the side, to the broken window where the scavengers had entered the first time. The window was at about chest level for Zephan, but in the past, this would have been the second storey. Nic boosted him onto the sill, and passed him the heavy canvas backpack. “We’ll be back before dark. Don’t get eaten by wolves.”

“You’re sure you don’t want to come with? I’m sure the ghosts would love to say hello.”

Nic’s chocolate eyes glared out from under his hood. “All kinds of no.” The scavengers made their departure, black shadows fading into the glistening whiteness.

Snow had trailed in through the open window, creating an easy slope for Zephan to climb down. He found himself in a room that was not altogether unlike his own medical ward. The rusted remains of bed frames, some of them still bearing the decayed husks of mattresses, lined the walls. As his eyes adjusted to the dimmer light, he marveled at what still remained of the room. In places, he could still see the faint print of the wallpaper, where the sun shining through the high windows had not faded it completely. Rings still hung from the ceiling bearing what must have been curtains to pull around the beds. Tattered fabric still hung from some of the rings, blowing eerily in the frozen wind. There were no bodies. Not yet.

He did not know many details about the Storm. That was what they called it, like it had been a mere act of nature that had wreaked such destruction. The accounts of that day were too enormous, too fantastical, to imagine. Fire that rained from the sky, the earth splintering like wood, hurricanes tearing through the land like an enormous beast. It had been a war with darkness, a war with the stars. The story claimed that the darkness had lost, that their heroes, their goddesses, had defeated it. What the story did not bother to say, for everybody already knew, was that they had lost as well. 

Zephan passed down a long hallway, filled with snow and debris, rusted and unrecognizable items cluttering the floor. The inhabitants of the entire refuge could fit into this single building, if they wanted. How large was this city once? How many more cities had there been like it? And now, were they all that was left, just a bunch of people numbering only in the hundreds, huddling in the tunnels that their once-great civilization had built, while the cold raged overhead?

No wonder Nic wanted to believe in strangers from other refuges. If he had to look at so many reminders of what their world had once been every day, probably Zephan would cling to such hope himself.

Nic had armed him with an axe and a crowbar, and between the two he managed to access a locked supply closet. He recognized the names of the drugs he found from books. Some of it would be usable. Much of it was not. His fingers were too numb to fiddle with the bottles to see which was which, and so he dumped as much as he could into his pack. With any luck, the cold would have preserved the old medications well beyond their normal expiry date. 

He knew, from the many victims of hypothermia that he had treated, that he needed to keep moving. Nic would not be back for some hours yet. He continued down long corridors, his footsteps echoing when they crunched over ice and muffled when forced to trudge through deep snow. Once, he thought he heard the distant scratching of some animal. He quickly made his way in the opposite direction.

He found himself at a crossroads, a faded old directory on the wall showing him the multitude of departments he could visit. Nephrology, Neorology, Neonatal... what an abundance of specializations this discipline once held. And here Zephan was, struggling to replicate all of them. One word caught his eye. Pediatrics. Probably, they would have plenty of specialized medication and equipment. In the refuge, which had too many children and too few elderly, there might be some benefit to taking a look.

The light slanted sharply down over the hall, a broken window somewhere nearby causing the wind to whistle eerily and the snow to swirl down over him. The floor had caved in here, a dark and jagged maw into which snowflakes vanished without a trace. It looked easy enough to walk around, however. It was only a part of the floor.

The floor gave only one long groan of warning. Then it was gone.

***

The ghosts had found him. Zephan blinked, his aching head struggling to make sense of the blurred vision before him. Light from above streamed down into the dark hole where he lay, glistening on the figure that stood beneath it. White and ice blue. The ghost of one who had been frozen.

The figure shifted, moved closer, and irrationally Zephan tried to sit up, as though he would be any less defenseless. His left arm sent a sharp jolt of pain shooting up its length when he tried to put it beneath him. He hissed in pain, collapsing back onto the hard floor.

“Don’t try to move. Not yet.”

The figure shifted closer again, out of the beam of light that caused it to glisten, proving itself to be real and human after all. The blur of a face clarified, revealing kind blue eyes. The blue was in her hair and in what she wore.

Dozens of questions swirled in Zephan’s head, but all he could blurt was, “Aren’t you cold?”

It was not a completely ridiculous question. The woman wore something tight-fitted that left much of her legs and arms exposed. There was nothing on her head, no scarf over her face. The woman pursed her lips in a kind of smile, as if remembering a private joke. “No, I am not.” She reached up and gently prodded at the side of his forehead. It stung slightly at her touch. “You hit your head, but the trauma was not bad. You will want to look at this cut later.”

His arm was cold, in addition to throbbing in pain, and now he saw that the sleeve of his oversized coat had been pulled up and a brace fitted over the arm. “You have a small fracture in your radial bone.” She slid a finger, so softly he could not feel it through the thick brace, over his forearm. “Just here.”

“How would you know that?” Zephan knew there had once been equipment to help discover the internal workings of a body--X-rays and CT scans and microscopic cameras--but these were all mythic relics of the past, like cars and airplanes. 

“I have my ways. This place is very dangerous. What were you searching for here?”

Zephan sat up more carefully this time, cradling his arm to his chest. The cold seeped up through the floor beneath him, overriding any possible comfort that could be had from staying where he was. “Medicine. We’re running out…” He studied her face again, seeking some kind of recognition. But she was as alien as her garments. “You aren’t from the refuge.”

She looked at him curiously. “Is that what you call it? There are a number of you living underground, aren’t there?”

None of this made any sense. Maybe Zephan had hit his head harder in the fall than he thought, and he was still unconscious, dreaming of ghosts from other places. “Then, do you know the stranger we found?”

Her deep blue eyes looked troubled. “I tracked him here. He should not have come alone.”

“I’m sorry. He is badly injured.” 

The woman did not physically shrug, but she seemed as unconcerned as if she had. “Is he?” She reached out, took Zephan by his good hand. “Come, let us find more medicine for your refuge.”

The feeling that he was in a dream did not stop, as he followed the strange woman through the halls of the ancient building. She navigated her way through the corridors as though she knew where she was going, identified tools and equipment and medications for him as though she had seen them before. The childish idea that she was a ghost from days long past lingered in the back of his mind, and made him feel too foolish to ask too many questions. 

The sun was nearing the horizon when the two of them returned to the window where Zephan had first entered, his pack heavily laden with precious cargo. “Nic should be back soon. He’ll guide us safely back to the refuge.”

She climbed out the window first, then took the backpack from him. Though it was almost too heavy for Zephan now, she lifted it as easily as though it were empty. “That is kind of you. But I will not be coming.”

“What do you mean? The sun will be down soon.” If it was cold outside now, that was nothing compared to what it would be after nightfall. 

“I will be fine.” She stood framed by the window, a creature of blue and white in the dazzling light.

It did not make sense, but nothing made sense since she appeared, and her answers only brought more questions. “Don’t you want to see your friend?”

“I think, perhaps, he wanted to do this alone. Though I do not entirely agree with him, I believe I should respect that.”

“Do what alone?”

She gave Zephan a long, searching look that made him wish he was wearing his nice clothes back home with his hair neatly groomed, instead of standing in a decrepit ruin in borrowed winter clothes that were tattered and stank. “You are so young. You have never known anything but winter, have you?”

“No younger than you, I think.”

She smiled. “Perhaps.”

“I don’t think you understand what condition your friend is in. The frostbite was extensive. He will lose…. well, there will be much tissue that we have to remove.”

“I think you will find him more resilient than you suspect.”

He stared at her. Mysterious phantom from beyond the horizon though she may be, some things were just medical fact. “You can’t heal frostbite.”

“Can’t you?” She left his pack propped against the wall, and turned away. The wind tugged at her hair, at the long trailing ribbons of her skirt. 

Zephan scrambled awkwardly out the window, holding his broken arm close to himself, and stumbled down onto the packed snow. “Wait! I… will I see you again?”

She smiled, the snow fluttering between them making her fade into the whiteness. A ghost once again. “When the winter has ended, you will see me.”

She left him there, waiting alone in the cold. He watched her form grow smaller, still squinting into the blinding white even after he was certain that any blue shadow he thought he saw in the distance was only imagined.

Nic had a fit when he learned of Zephan’s broken arm, ranting and gesticulating with his big gloved hands most of the way back to the refuge. Zephan mostly remained silent, even when Nic tried to bait him with talk of know-nothing doctors who don’t belong in the wilderness. He hauled the backpack down to the medical ward for him, his complaints continuing all through the halls. The blond healer sighed. All he wanted to do was peel off the sweaty layers of fur and wool, see to his arm, and hide under his blankets for the next week. Perhaps with a dose of some of that medication he had salvaged. Then he remembered, with a pang of guilt, that his patient would be needing that medication far more than he did. The mysterious woman’s friend. What a fool he was for not finding some way to convince her to come. She never even gave him her name.

So lost in thought was Zephan that he did not notice Nic had stopped until he collided right into what was nothing but a solid wall of snow-covered fur. “So that patient of yours…” Nic said slowly, “you did not happen to find a way to regrow his skin since I last saw him, did you?”

Zephan did not think he could take another dose of cryptic statements of this nature. He shoved past Nic into the medical ward. “What are you even talking abou--”

Somebody was standing by Zephan’s desk, reading over a stack of papers. Zephan felt mildly embarrassed to remember that the papers were a disorganized mess of medical notes and sketches of people. This somebody had taken the liberty of borrowing some of Zephan’s clothes--he was miffed to see his nice vest on somebody else’s body. The man turned. He was familiar, and he was not. He had the same black hair that Zephan had stared at for days. But his face was not black to match. Neither were the fingers that held the papers in his hands. The skin that covered them was as fresh and alive as that of a newborn.

“Oh, hello. I was wondering when you would be back.” His face and his voice were not like any in the refuge that Zephan knew, and yet it seemed to him that they were both exactly what they should be, like he had always expected him to look and sound just like this.

There are no strangers, he thought.

Zephan moved closer, aware that six hours ago, he would have been much more skeptical of the sight before him. He could hear Nic moving behind him, pausing to hover just inside the door. “I met somebody who was looking for you,” he said hesitantly.

“I’m sure you did,” the man replied, his sharp blue eyes studying the young medic. His hand drifted up to Zephan’s forehead, just where the blue-haired girl had touched him before. “That looks like it hurt.” A warm tingle, a kind of warmth that he had never known in all his years huddling beneath the frozen surface, began in his head and seemed to spread right down to his toes.

You can’t heal frostbite.

It was like the first breath of spring.


End file.
